Ericsson improves wireless WAN for Sunswift Racing

Sunswift Racing has announced that it is using technology from Ericsson Enterprise Wireless Solutions to provide uninterrupted connectivity between its solar race cars, its support vehicles and its headquarters in Sydney. Ericsson will provide major improvements in wireless WAN communications using Intelligent Link Bonding, which combines multiple WAN links — cellular, satellite or wired — into a single, logical connection and leverages traffic steering and cellular intelligence features to make decisions about how traffic is distributed.

Sunswift Racing is a team of innovators at UNSW Sydney, working to redefine the future of sustainable transport through the research and development of world-class prototype electric cars. The team is known for its record-holding success in various Bridgestone World Solar Challenge events and will be competing at this year’s week-long event from Darwin to Adelaide from 24–31 August.

The World Solar Challenge competitors rely on race and vehicle performance data to make strategic decisions during the week-long event. With real-time access to data enabled with Ericsson wireless connectivity solutions, the Sunswift team will be collecting and using live telemetry data during the race; this includes live data about the solar car’s battery, electric motor, solar panel and vehicle speedometer. Reliable connectivity will also be vital for live video, IP push-to-talk communication for status reporting, real-time race video streaming for the team’s YouTube channel, and reliable internet access.

Ericsson Cradlepoint ruggedised R1900 routers connected to 5G and satellite links are managed with Ericsson NetCloud to provide multi-carrier connectivity back to Sunswift headquarters. Ericsson’s Intelligent Link Bonding will be used to optimise the bandwidth of all available WAN links to deliver consistent performance and always-on connectivity over cellular and satellite-supporting uninterrupted live telemetry data sharing and video streaming. Intelligent Link Bonding enhances resiliency and performance with the following features:

• Flow duplication for high resiliency — duplicating application traffic flows across two WAN links simultaneously to provide high availability.
• Flow balancing for link optimisation and cost savings — distributing traffic flows across multiple links based on predefined weights or percentages to enhance performance and cost efficiency.
• Bandwidth aggregation for increased bandwidth — combining two or more WAN connections to increase the overall bandwidth available for large data transfers. This can significantly boost performance for large file uploads or real-time video uploads.

Each of these features can be enabled on an Ericsson Cradlepoint router with SD-WAN. Additional features such as application-based traffic steering, forward error correction and rich AI insights can also be leveraged.

“This next evolution of uninterrupted connectivity from Ericsson will enable our team to perform at their peak during the upcoming race,” said Professor Richard Hopkins, Team Principal of UNSW Sunswift Racing.

“At Ericsson, we are committed to ensuring uninterrupted connectivity during high-stakes race events,” added Archana Khetan, Senior Vice President of Enterprise Wireless Solutions at Ericsson. “Our Intelligent Link Bonding technology empowers organisations to achieve unmatched application resiliency, enhanced performance and optimised bandwidth use — even in the most challenging mobile environments.

“As more businesses adopt multi-WAN strategies, managing these various connections intelligently is becoming essential. Showing how well this works in one of the world’s most challenging race environments underscores the value of this technology in any enterprise environment.”